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Build your studio in the cloud. Lagoa is a brand new cloud-based rendering and design collaboration platform with solutions for 3D and design professionals, enterprise customers and application developers.

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An industry first is what the co-creators of Lagoa are claiming about their new “cloud-based 3D design platform.” While we at Architosh have been talking about the cloud much lately in conjunction with iOS and other mobile platforms, the cloud as a platform for software as a service (SaaS) is still one of the bigger transformative events taking place throughout the IT industry.

Lagoa says they are helping take 3D into a new dimension with a full advanced 3D rendering and collaboration platform entirely in the cloud. So let’s take a look at what that is and means. But before we do that, let’s also mention that Lagoa has also just announced 1.6.USD million in a round of seed funding from a strong list of backers including 500 Startups, Atlas Venture, Real Ventures and RHO Ventures, as well as a number of angels.

Understanding Lagoa

Lagoa is a complete rendering application accessible through your standards-compliant web browser. While Google Chrome is the preferred choice to access and run Lagoa on it also runs on Firefox and Apple’s Safari too. There is even an iPad application that lets you see interactive rendering scenes.

01 – Lagoa is a new top-funded tech offering focused on serving state-of-the-art cloud-based rendering and collaboration through your browser. There is also an iPad app.

Microsoft Internet Explorer is the odd-man out as that is not supported, a very clear sign of just how much the overall computer industry has changed (and how open industry standards are the new normal).

WebGL is the required technology necessary for your browser to work with Lagoa’s MultiOptics technology. WebGL is a GPU OpenGL library that runs natively inside your web browser. You can verify that your browser has this installed and working by clicking here. If you see the spinning cube you are good to go.

To get your models into Lagoa you drag them into the viewport of an open scene, or you can use an upload button. 3D model format supported include .obj, .3ds, .ply, .stl, .dae and .lwo. You can also upload your models in these formats in a zip file.

Lagoa runs on Mac, Windows and Linux through the browsers mentioned above, plus there is the iPad app.

The Rendering Technology

Lagoa MultiOptics is a proprietary unbiased rendering engine that is powered in the cloud. The company makes a note of explaining what “unbiased rendering” is as compared to “biased rendering” like OpenGL. In a nutshell for those who are not familiar, unbiased rendering does not cheat on the lighting to rendering a 3D scene. You can learn more about that subject here.

02 – This is a screen shot of the Lagoa user-interface. There are many videos showing the rendering service.

Lagoa is offering cloud-based software as a service to both professional end users and other developers via an API. It’s rendering samples on its site are truly stunning. Pricing is based on a monthly fee and starts at a Free level and scales up from there to 35.USD to 123.USD per month on annualized plans.